The Smoke of Her Burning
by The Hart and Hound
Summary: The val'kyr will not leave her alone. Arthas/Jaina.
1. sie verbrannte

Title: The Smoke of Her Burning (1/?)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Warcraft

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Warcraft belongs to Blizzard Entertainment.

Summary: The val'kyr will not leave her alone. Arthas/Jaina.

* * *

My mother said: you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting at my throat.

-Sylvia Plath, _Electra on Azalea Path _

* * *

0. (_You do not like this ending._)

* * *

Jaina can sometimes recall the night they put Lady Proudmoore's body to the fire. She doesn't think of it very often, and when it sits in the corners of her eyes, it's an unpleasant yellowing that colors everything she sees, and she shies away from it, like it is something to be walked around. It is almost physical the way she turns away from it, a sharp blink and tightening of the shoulders, and the flex of her muscle sends the thought away. The sudden pressure of her blood in her neck and ears distracts her.

But sometimes she thinks on it deliberately.

She can't blink and sigh it away when she does that.

Moira Proudmoore is grey and waxy in her mind's eye, which sees out from tiny hands and eyes. Jaina doesn't remember what she was wearing other than a small pair of velvet shoes that had pinched her toes. She had been able to concentrate on that, and feel irritated by it, and her child's mind couldn't appreciate the distraction of it like she can the tensing of her shoulders. She complained to her father once during the evening, and he had pushed her towards Tandred, looking pinched and thin in what she knows now to be grief. (_At least that was normal_.)

She did not look at Lady Proudmoore if she could. She didn't look real, like a wax-cast of her mother, with ruddy circles beneath the eyes like bruises. The flesh was spongy there, where it had been tender and hot before. Her mother had winced when last Jaina had put her hands on her face, and gently pulled her hands away with illness soft hands.

"It's because I am out of tears," her mother says, her accent sharp, breathy as they like it in the north, away from the sea and tucked into the mountains. "There's a furnace inside me, and it has nothing to dull it's heat, so it burns beneath my eyes where the skin is thin."

Jaina offered her a glass of water. She had politely refused, and instead stuck a leaf of mint beneath her tongue. "It cools me faster," she had explained, and Jaina had regretted grabbing the leaves for her when next she sees her mother, who was cold and vacant.

She does not use the word 'dead'. That implies them being the same person, that body and her mother, and she can't see any similarity between the two other than a passing resemblance, like how the Admiral's army looks when wearing their helms. Perhaps there is a mask that is universal to death as there is one to war.

Her father steers her away from the unlit pyre that they have made for the body, holding and grinding the bones of her hands between his to the point where she can't tell his apart from hers. (_It is the closest the two of you have ever been._) She can't see him very well in the twilight, but she can hear him, and his breath is heavy and steady as the waves near their home in Kul Tiras, and just as crushingly loud.

The hairs on the back of his hand tickle her skin. It almost itches, his mood so abrasive to her, like he means to scour her clean of her mother's body. She knows they will burn the body on the pyre because of the sickness that took it. Derek says that it's catching.

(_A sickness also takes Derek elsewhere, only the sickness is dragon flame, which burns the body without a funeral, so the Lord Admiral and you are not sure what to grieve, only that you should. The orc army is nothing if not efficient, and they raze everything between Stormwind and Alterac_.)

"It's fine wood, Daelin, dry pine from Harrowshire. It should burn beautifully," says the priest standing near her father, and he is resplendent in his gold and scarlet, hat carefully placed over the crown of his head. It doesn't fit quite right, like it may be too small for him, and Jaina thinks of second-hands, of the used shoes they have drives for in the fall. She's given up her fair share of old slippers at the behest of her mother. Gave. Had given.

She's not sure how the tenses are supposed to fall for people who are (_missing_) dead.

"Pyres are for heathens," her father mutters. "For those who don't deserve recognition. Moira is…was more than that."

"It is the way of the northerners to burn their dead, at least the people of the mountains. Some sort of superstition about the cold dead. The flames supposed to keep them safe into the afterlife," says the priest, and he is skimming between the pages of his prayer book, licking his fingertips and pulling. She can hear the rasp of the heavy lamb parchment. "All entirely myth, of course, nothing scientific or holy about it. But still one of the oldest religions in the known world."

Her father frowns. Something about the words feel wrong to her too.

The fire that they set to the pyre is dry and reaching, catching hooks beneath her eyelids, where the dryness rasps against the skin there and drags it until all she can see is the angry flesh. It's better somehow this way, because at least with this inconvenience, she only catches a glimpse of the burning of Moira Proudmoore. But what little she does she bothers her, a cinder halo of once yellow hair (_not unlike her own_), the white bone of her mother's (_impostor_) fingers reaching up from the ash, claws blackening and whitening until there's little else she can see.

She had had such soft hands.

Jaina swallows around the ash, and hides her face in Derek's leg, but she can still see the glow of the fire against the inside of her skull, with black reaching fingers. At first she is afraid that it has burnt itself into her eyelids, and she resents her family for bringing her here at all, like she has done something wrong and is meant to be punished.

Her father's remorse is also suffocating and black, and she thinks of pitch and the smell of the burning that is near and wonders if he won't spark and catch, like his grief is oily and thick and somehow linked between him and her mother. She is terrified for a moment that he may catch fire too, and despite her fear to see, she pulls her face from the nook of Derek's waist.

The smoke is billowing and white, and there is so much of it that at first she does not see where her father is, and instead takes to looking for the glint of gold on his shoulders. She does find him eventually, a grey mark on the cold-whitened smoke, the evening a dusk blue that expands away from them until it feels frigid and vast, and the pyre but a small point to anchor her with its heat.

Maybe it is just morbid curiosity (_the kind that gets you into the arcane, the kind that gets you into Stratholme, and Hyjal, and the Undercity while Varian is breathing violence against the broken stone that used to be Lordaeron and you are feeling hot and suddenly very tired…_) , but she does eventually turn to look into the fire again, if only to see if it is gone, if the claws will disappear from behind her eyes.

Her mother's arm is blanched and raised, mottled with blackness. Reaching, she thinks, like she is waiting for someone to pull her up, only instead they lit her up and didn't help her get away.

She feels guilty, somehow.

"Light go with you," says the priest.

As a mage, Jaina does not use her fire spells. The heat always twitches between her fingers, and she imagines them burnt away.


	2. I

Title: The Smoke of Her Burning (1/9)

Author: tsubaki-hana

Series: Warcraft

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Warcraft belongs to Blizzard Entertainment.

Summary: The val'kyr will not leave her alone.

* * *

1. Where I end and you begin.

* * *

"_Gluck auf!_" the sign reads cheerily.

Good health, good luck, Jaina thinks, and runs a finger along the fraying edges of the sign, a sad remnant of Gahrron's Quickening. It is the language of the North, the fierce tongue, and so little of it had been spoken after the time that Lordaeron absorbed the lands on and east of the Darrowmere. Stratholme had been far from the king city, and it was steel, and cold, and everything that the east people had been raised from, the ash trees, mountains, and mist. The Quickening had been a worker's home, with all the sturdiness of the motherland.

The small farm and post stands quiet now, and she can only think of the grain that used to be here, instead of the damp and mossy ground that sinks around her feet. It smells bitter, of rot and death. Vaguely, she wonders how many of the Scourge have fallen here. She has killed another round of them just a half hour before.

Varian's entourage has become a nuisance as they approach the Undercity, their armor loud and their voices louder. They mean to deal with Putress this day, and Jaina cannot help but think that the old alchemist must hear them from a mile away. It is a wonder that they have not drawn the Scourge that are as thick as flies around Andorhal, but Varian and Broll continue to ignore her drawn lips, her hesitance.

(_You are afraid of the Scourge, they think. You are afraid to run into Thrall in the Undercity. You're afraid of a lot of things, and because you are a woman and a mage, they think it guilelessly. Is it more irritating to know that they simply think you weak?_)

"Collectively, if you breathe any louder, we'll have Putress, Whitemane, and the Baron Riverdare on us at once," she says aloud, and listens to Varian snort into the back of a gauntlet.

Varian is a head and a half taller than her, and he enjoys beaming smiles down on her, good natured ones. She doesn't know how to hate someone that is so guileless towards her. He thinks she is being overly cautious, when all she really wants is to slap him and burn his tent down with frustration.

"I shall strive to breathe less often, and in lesser gulps then, like how they teach children to eat. I think Anduin may have it down." Varian grins around the new shadow of his beard. "And not the Baron, at least, Lady Proudmoore," he says, tightening a greave. "He is in Naxxramas, with the rest of that ill favored brood. If you will recall from the reports, he has taken Highlord Mograine's place in the Knighthood."

Jaina frowns sharply. "You know what I meant. Is it not you that wished to be in the Undercity and heavily armed as soon as you could deploy?"

"The dwarves were not ready to move as quickly as I, and the require their flying machines in order to clear the air for us. Sylvanas is very fond of her bats, it would seem. Perhaps she hasn't cleared them all from her head."

She snorts, and rolls a shoulder, as good-humored as she may. "Or her house. As we understand it, Varimathras has dealt her a rough hand as well. A poor hand, for one who showed him mercy, I might add."

"Must you always insist on the inherent virtue of the Horde? As I rather see it, her Forsaken have the run of a territory that should have rightly gone to you, me, and Gilneas, Light be kind to them. Never mind the fact that the bulk of the Horde killed both yours and my father, as well as your brother." Another greave tightened, another matching irritable sigh. She smiles crookedly, somehow pleased. (_You will ignore the needling feeling in the back of your throat when you think of Derek and the Admiral. It is enough that he is now as irritated as you were, if not so heartsick with your father's blood._)

"Then it will irritate you further to know that we are inadvertently giving Sylvanas back her city. After all, we have neither the troops or the supplies to hold the Undercity from the Horde, that will undoubtedly also be here to salvage the situation."

Varian scowls, but soon after laughs, something rough and weary into the air. "Then, as we deal with Putress and Varimathras, Arthas takes it into his head that he is homesick and would very much like all of us to leave either single file or one at a time as ghouls."

(_Try not to flinch. You cannot stand the sound of his name, and you must never let anyone know_.)

Jaina swallows around a dry tongue. "Yes, we'll all wait in line to have a go at each other, fair and courtly like they handled feuds in Kul Tiras," she says thickly, so sweetly that she feels herself choking on the humid air. "You and Thrall, Sylvanas against Putress and Varimathras, and I will take..."

"But what am I saying," he lauds, and now he has an audience, and she cannot finish what she had meant to say. Judging by the sick churn of her stomach, it is likely for the best. "The Lich King probably has no patience for a line in undeath any more than he did in life. As much as I'd enjoy a scrap with Thrall as much as the next, maybe we'll get lucky and he'll kill the whole motley crew before we ever get there." A loud laugh, too loud for her, and he goes to mount his horse again.

It's not funny, she thinks, and tries to clear her frustration like she does her throat. The idea of _him_, there, fills her lungs with icy white fear, like the blush of frost on panes of glass. The fact that it scares her only makes her more angry because three years after the fact, she ought not be afraid anymore. (_You ought to be more than you are._) Jaina, for all the patience her master had taught her, grinds a heel into the ground before calling for her mare. The beast is getting old, maybe too old for this part of the world, and she feels sorry for the horse's hooves, which slide and slip in the mud.

Her own feet are irredeemable, the leather blackened in the mire with coal grit and unhealthy soil (_flesh_). There used to be a mine nearby, she thinks idly, and with it they brought up their black gold, and black lungs, and were happy to go beneath the ground and bury themselves in the earth. Most died with a horrible wracking cough. The others were old before their time, never warm in spite of their bounty of fuel. She wonders if every job is so very ironic and miserable.

"Gluck auf!" they'd wish each other, and duck their soot-covered heads into the caves with lanterns and picks. She can hear their feet scrape the ground, their arms bump each other in nervousness. "Good luck coming back up!"

"Gluck auf!" says the sign, with peeling letters, and Jaina takes a chip of paint, like it will keep her safe.

* * *

Everything is venom and chill in the sewers of the Undercity, hollowed out and furious with its own cold. The tunnels are maws, and she runs between them before they can close their mouths on her. Varian is a dervish of steel and fury ahead of her, and she feels strange when an abomination's bowels hit the wall and she is not sickened.

Jaina still remembers Hyjal, and this is not so unlike it, perhaps less imminent, less rushed to the point that she is afraid and living and _the ice between her fingers is so beautiful and cold and cleaving her fingertips like knives and..._

She takes a breath. She focuses on Varian.

"My dear Lady Proudmoore," Varian is laughing, howling over his satisfaction, "if you do not hurry, then there will be nothing left for you to have. We near Putress now, and then you'll have to make due with leftovers." It is true. There will be nothing left in his path or between the blades of Shalla'tor and Ellemayne, and they are gleaming wickedly in the greasy torchlight. They are matched only by the Doomhammer, and Jaina does not like to think of their meeting. (_Everything you try to prevent always happens, doesn't it?_)

"There is battle and then there is massacre," she says. "I am saving the best of my energy for Putress, as I do not suspect an easy fight."

Varian frowns a little, and shakes the gore from his swords. "There is also justice and efficiency. I show no mercy for my opponents, and expect none in return. You would do well to remember that."

"Not everything is so black and white."

"And how do you propose to weigh the shades of grey towards good or evil?" Varian bites back, but even now he is looking at her like she is mad. "It is a kinder world where everything is understandable and categorizable. Do the mages not dissect and name the different things of the world? As I understand it, you have libraries of absolutes. Why is it so wrong for me to live my life with that sort of certainty?"

Another abomination run towards them. Varian looks at her. He wants her to kill it.

Inherently, she knows that an abomination is a golem composed of the bloated body parts of humans, hastily stitched and seamed with wire and the clawing ambition of necromancy. It is Scourge, it is an enemy and a threat. The intuition of her body tells her to run, to bare teeth and shout, to do _something_.

The same observing eye, and this one she knows to be the intellect, sees fingers, little ones, curled tight with rigor, with little blue nail beds. There is the scarred back of a man, old, the spine contorting out of the belly of the monster like a snake of bone. She wonders when she freezes it if they hurt. Does the rest of the body, across the continent and half decomposed, yearn for its missing flesh? Perhaps the abomination is a culmination of consciousnesses, trapped in the red of the marrow. She might unearth the nerves, pin them, test them in a back in Dalaran, and then she could know. She could be hurting someone. She could be hurting no one.

There is a flash of the abomination's hook, and she half-expects to feel it rip into her waist and draw her in, but Varian pushes her, and deflects it. There is another flash, and the mildewed cobblestone is splashed with ichor. It steams, and rises in curls of rotten-sweet smell.

When she turns to see Varian's face, she has half a mind to thank him and another to leave. For all the openness of the Undercity, they are too close and too different to be within range of each other. Opposite magnetism.

The king's face is a torrent, in parts angry and in others inherently sad. "Do you really want to be here, Jaina? There's too much evil in the world for hesitance. Your aid is always appreciated, and wanted, but your reluctance to ever act is not."

She frowns. "You are my friend, Varian. I would help you, but I only want to look at things from every angle before I walk into something I am unprepared to deal with." As she says this, his face just twists further down.

"You want to fuss with semantics. I want to be done with it. I want to be done with all of it."

(_You've heard something like that before, and it ended in fire._)

He turns towards the Apothecarium, and Jaina follows, because she likes to think she is a different person than she was the last time she was in Lordaeron.

(_You're not._)

* * *

She means to go home, after all, it's what she should do now that everyone is where they should be, and she is probably pending a banishment from the kingdom of Stormwind for stopping the imminent battle of the leaders of the world. To some extent, she finds it funny that a woman that weighs half as much as either man is able to throw their fight off at all, much less completely stop it.

She feels powerful, and she enjoys it while it lasts. Jaina knows that she will feel weak again when she returns home and the adrenaline has tapered off into dread. (_Will you be friends with Thrall still? Will Varian try to take your home out right from under you? it funny how you think of everything else so thoroughly, but your judgment has lapsed here. You can't have one without the other, after all._)

Magic can take her anywhere that she knows, and while Jaina rarely abuses the privilege, she feels the need to leave, to change the air she is breathing, to not know anyone. For a wild moment, she thinks of Outland, of Hyjal, even of Wintergarde Keep, where all know her name but none have seen her face.

She finds herself here instead.

The alley is dusty with soot, undisturbed for years. Her boots look strange and lonely, clean as they are amidst the rotted wood and ashes. It has been years since the last time she was so thoroughly alone.

Stratholme has missed the stir of her breath.

She wonders if the ghouls within remember it. She had spent so little time there, too afraid of the plague, of the inevitable guilt of being a viewer. There had been nothing she could do. Nothing. She takes comfort in the word, and sighs tightly around the clench of her chest.

Between the eaves of the buildings, the sky is resolute and grey with smoke, but it does not give off the heat that she remembers. It feels as though it is fake, maybe just a remnant of the last thing she had seen. Jaina is a powerful mage, and she may manipulate the appearance of the world as she sees fit, as long as there are eyes to see.

She cannot make it real. It doesn't bother her like it first did.

"No use in just standing here," she mutters, and turns her feet in the dust, firmly, where she can see the switch of her feet. Others will too, but she is feeling reckless and strong today. Stratholme is not the threat it once was, not since Naxxramas had left for Northrend. With the death of the Highlord, and the breaking of the first waves of the citadel, the north of Lordaeron had grown quiet, complacently filled with illness, like the old that wait to die.

(_Don't think of her_.)

The alley opens up slowly, as is the way of the old lands. The city had been built for fortification against the ground and air alike, built close together. Before the plague, Stratholme had been spoken of as the old people's fortress against the gods of the north, built for winter and dragons. The majority of the historian's liked to think of it instead as lack of plumbing knowledge. Jaina rather thought they just liked to paint themselves more intelligent than the people of the past.

Stratholme is built in two parts, the upper and lower city, the home of the armory and the home of the nobility. All is done in halves by the reckoning of the North, and Jaina thinks of her grandmother, an old lady of the court, and the raw accent that she bore when she had visited Kul Tiras to watch after her brothers and herself. She considered herself separate from her grandchildren, like there had been some sort of gate between them that Jaina could not cross.

"Your southern blood draws you back down to the steel of the southern mountains, yes?" She had always spoken in questions, like she wasn't certain that she was understood. "Jaina is a smart girl, you understand your Oma? My husband is the half of me that speaks well, I am sad to say."

She had called herself the _spinelhaelf_. There was no word in Common that was equivalent, and she could only point to the spindle on her mother's weaving wheel. "The spindle, yes? I am the spindle to your Opa's _sperehaelf_. They look similar. All people come in halves and you are just waiting to be whole."

Jaina had not been satisfied with the explanation. Her grandmother had not been either, and drew her close until she could feel the click of her child's bones. Her father had held her mother like that sometimes, like a vine round a tree. She had wondered if her mother was dying because her father didn't match the other half of her, and he was breaking pieces off to fit.

As an older woman, Jaina thought instead that he had loved her desperately knowing that he would not have her for long. She's still not certain which one is correct.

Jaina shakes her head.

The stone is white, somewhere beneath the ash, bleached by the fire that had run through years ago, running still down the halls like it could not be caught. But the stone tells her that she is in the nobles end, and that she is suddenly weary of the Baroness, angry and chill in the face of her husband's undeath. Jaina does not remember very much of her when she had still be alive, only that her beauty had been pale and untouchable, her hair a slick of oil. (_You wonder when she caught fire like the city_.)

The city opens up to her, empty in places, filled with rubbish in others. She is on the outskirts, near a millinery that her grandmother had brought her to. There are no ghouls in this square, at least not now. Perhaps they have the presence of mind to drift by themselves. Maybe they recognize things like she does. Jaina is surprised by the coincidence of her memory, but knows that teleportation cannot be done without familiarity. (_You know more places in the king city of Lordaeron than Sylvanas can ever hope to achieve. The Violet Citadel is your playground, and Kul Tiras is but a flash of thought. But you cannot remember where your mother had lived before she had met your father, though she had tried to show you, and your grandmother again afterward_.)

There had been violence done in this square, and even in its hollows, Jaina can smell the burnt flesh and vomit of the infected that she had run from. She grew angry once at Tirion Fordring when he had spoken of the evil that Arthas had done to Stratholme once, when all she could remember was the panicked and pleading look that he had given her and Uther in the face of such calamity.

If she counts correctly, she knows he couldn't of been more than 25.

"I was right to leave," she says to herself, and looks at her hands around her staff. The sick were dying, the dead had been screeching, and Arthas couldn't stop yelling long enough to listen to the alternatives. (_Were there alternatives?_) She couldn't stop him, maybe she didn't try hard enough, maybe she should have done something different. She wished for the clarity that Varian felt so easily.

As it was, all she really felt was guilt.

You have to go home, her mind supplies quietly behind this, fingers clutched around the staff like it were an anchor. She needs to. She's in a stronghold of her enemy and there's not enough urgency to leave, even as the hairs on her arms stand up and she breathes in the mist.

She feels the eyes before she can see them.

It's like the barest of lace at the corner of her eye, and she thinks of sheets drying on the rack in the wind. It scrapes her vision until she looks and it is gone, but in the way of glass, not air. It is there, even if she does not see it. The heavy beat of wings is near her, and it rustles the tattered remnants of the cloth hanging in the nearby windows.

The city was built to defend the ground and the air, she thinks, and a nearby shingle is suddenly brushed off of its home, and the white appears again, web-like and translucent. It is a woman, and she is beautiful and cold like the snow of a mountain peak. Weightless black hefts of hair run from her head, and her eyes are shuttered, like they do with horses. They will not allow this woman to see for long, and very little when she does. Maybe she has no eyes at all behind the leather of her shutters, just little void pits that things grow up through to get to the light.

It is lovely, whatever it is, and suddenly, Jaina is terrified.

She gives no time for response, even acknowledgment. The crystal of her staff flashes, and Stratholme runs from her eyes. When she is calm enough to open them again, her study atop the Theramore tower icy cold, and she is thankful to fall into the chair, where her heart slows. She opens all the cabinets and doors, and is briefly satisfied that nothing here is closed off from her.

* * *

"I wish you would stop apologizing. Varian is a grown man with his own hatchet to bury."

She is staring at the desert sand when this is said, and Jaina looks up at Thrall, who's arms are crossed over his chest and chin buried into his neck. The wind is bitter tonight on the Barrens with the mounting threat of the monsoons and autumn, and both are braced against the unpleasant weather. She can't decide if she is more sorry that she called him out here.

She licks her lips. "I feel partially responsible. I had been at odds with him since we left Stormwind with the warriors from the Wrathgate. We had disagreed before fighting Putress, and it is likely that his ill temper carried over when he realized that you were there. I was more than able to stop it."

Thrall swings a braid from his face to sit on his back. "Regardless, he had issues with returning the Undercity to the Horde, and he would continue to even if you had fed him grapes the whole way from Stormwind to Tirisfal." He thinks for a moment, tapping a finger on the black armor of his wrists. "Don't do that, by the way."

Jaina laughs, and rubs her arms against another gust. "I would no sooner feed him grapes than I would become a member of his regular court. His moods are too swift to change and I am used to the calm of Kalimdor at this point. At least I can count on Tyrande and Velen to not change the politics on me three and four times a day."

"Thousands of years of politics have taught them better, though I am sure Tyrande might have stories to tell about herself and the Archdruid Staghelm. Had I the courage to ask, I might take a lesson or two from Velen."

The sky is red and grey in the fading autumn evening, and Thrall's zeppelin casts a shadow across the valley. She does not want to think about the elites that guard it and Thrall. She does not want to think about politics at all. Sometimes, she wonders if even Velen feels the same.

"People of every race have been making the same mistakes since the making of Azeroth. Even the Titans, if I am to believe everything that Brann likes to talk about, were not always in agreement, and usually resolved it by throwing mountains at each other." She laughs. "If I had a mountain to throw, I might very well throw it at Varian to see if it knocked his head at all."

A comfortable silence falls between the two of them, and they face the Barrens and distant totems of Taurajo. She likes the sturdiness of them, the warm of the wood and paint. She would get closer were she not afraid of upsetting the keepers. Cairne Bloodhoof's friendship is not shared between all his people, even as the aging tauren would have it. A kind heart like his could not be held by all.

Even now, her own throbs painfully, coldly. She cannot seem to still it as it had been. She can only think of it hidden in her chest, beating against her ribs to escape the remnants of her last travel.

She wants to speak. She might.

"I went to Stratholme two days ago, after the battle."

The words hit the ground beneath them, unstirringly on the mesa top. She thinks of them like stones that don't match the easy warmth of the desert, but river stones, black and rounded and strange.

Thrall is guarded for a moment, but looks at her with concern. "Are you well?" he asks.

(_You don't know_.) "As well as I can be. I wanted to see how active the Scourge were in the area since the removal of Naxxramas. I had not personally been in years."

"And?"

"There were so few of them in the area that I was in that it was hard to believe it was swarmed only perhaps a year or two ago. The absence of the Baron has lessened the infestation there. Only his cold wife remains, and I did not feel her stir." Jaina thinks of black hair. " I suppose no command has been sent to them, so now they simply idle, rotting in the rains up there."

Thrall nods, and paces a bit along the edge of their butte. "An army is only as effective as its commanders. With none, there is not much they can do other than wait." He thinks a moment longer. "Perhaps clearing Stratholme would be a good sign to the Horde and Alliance alike. One less Scourge stronghold in Azeroth should be good for just about everyone.""It still burns," she adds quickly. "Stratholme was close to a number of coal mines. I rather suspect that they burn beneath the city and keep the squares aflame around the armory. It's not inhabitable by any other than the dead."

"And the Scarlet Crusade?" Thrall adds dryly.

"Will be dead soon as well. I suspect it is the one thing that the Scourge there still have to focus on. They will whittle each other away until either one is demolished. The Silver Hand does not have the resources to assault both Stratholme and Icecrown."

Both shift unhappily in their boots, glaring down into the retreating sunset. Jaina feels in some way that she has said something disappointing. She feels like everything she has said for the last two days has somehow been muddled up. She has made herself useless with nostalgia, with things she cannot fix.

(_You are turning into your father_.)

"I feel like I am wrong," she says suddenly. "No, wait, I mean I feel like something is wrong. Like it is me. I don't know why, I just do." Her head shakes, and she chews her lip, suddenly embarrassed. "I shouldn't be saying this."

Thrall is a good friend, and says nothing at first, stilling her hands with a hand that envelopes her entire shoulder. She feels the presence of the spirits he keeps and his good heart, and she is suddenly envious of his steadiness. She doesn't have that (_can't, will not_).

"I trust that you do not mean politics," he says with a wry smile, tusks pulling at the corners of his mouth. (_See! How lucky he is to have something to hold his smile up! You think to devise wires, hooks, sewing like an abomination_.) "Rest, Jaina. I sense that you have not slept well in several days, and it is beginning to get the better of you. Do not trouble with Stratholme or the Scourge for a few days at least. There are others with the same fight as you that will hold for half a week without you."

It is not a solution, but it is an answer, and Jaina is gracious enough to smile and thank him for his advice. He is thoughtful of her and stands between the north wind and her for now, breaking the cold around her. He is not there always (_you wish it were so_), and she keeps the kindnesses tight to her, like they might slip away before their full value is known.

* * *

Her room is alight with lamps, more than she ever keeps, five to a desk, seven to the bookshelf, but she cannot help it. With every light that she adds, the room feels less oppressive, less like another room beyond the windows of Stratholme. She keeps the windows open and the door ajar so that she can see into the next space, remind herself of home.

"You should not have visited that place," Aegwynn had said earlier in the evening as she lit her candles, the old sorceress irritable and stone still in the center of the room. "You are behaving as a child who has heard a ghost story. You're a mage, probably the most powerful one, barring the dragons, and if you think that if the hundred of us that serve you here in the citadel miss anything coming for you in the night, that you most assuredly would be able to deal with it."

"Then you will not grudge me my candles, so that I can make certain that if the hundred of you miss the old witch in the forest, I will see her coming," Jaina had snapped, hair pulled away from her face roughly.

She feels strained even now, her eyes tired and hands cramped from filling out paperwork for shipments and troop updates from the north. There are problems at home, and all she can think of is soot on her shoe and the growing dread that she has done something wrong.

(_Just wait until you find out what_.)

Jaina cannot shake the feeling of watching, of eyes in the walls. Her magic tells her its nothing, and her wit tells her that she is simply reliving a part of her life that she had not been prepared to see again. But her skin crawls, and she can't stop looking into her periphery, where the glass white that sees her keeps crawling into her mind. The feeling itches, and she takes to staring at the papers so that she cannot distinguish anything from the bundle of parchment in front of her.

She'll sleep just as soon as her heart stops racing.


End file.
